Today, search and text mining functions allow a user to search for words or phrases in electronic documents of a database as for example in electronic messages like emails and other types of messages. These functions calculate a relevance of a message depending on search terms inputted by the user and based on the content of the message, as for example on an email content. This calculation does not account for any meta-information of the message.
For clarification purposes, the differences between a document content and the meta-information related to that document as it should be understood within the scope of the present patent application is shortly explained in the following. The message content or the content of another type of document comprises all text, graphics, audio, video, etc. included in the so-called message or document body. The meta-information related to a message or a document comprises all information about the document or the message and also the processing of the document or the message. In case of an email or another kind of message the processing of the message in the mail system includes for example an addressing information as indicated by fields “To”, “CC”, “BCC”, “Send by”, date and time fields, information about the message thread, i.e. associated messages, and information about the processing of a message and the message thread. That means that the meta-information gives information about any action the user did on the message, as for example, whether the user read the message or replied to the message. With respect to the message thread, the meta-information can disclose how much activity has been on the message thread, as for example how many people replied to any message within the message thread.
Referring to the field of messaging systems, a prior art messaging client cannot indicate a relevance of a new message to a user as the reader of that message. In lieu thereof, it performs a chronological ordering of new messages and may additionally interpret a message field which denotes an importance of the message. This field is, however, set by the sender of the message and normally does not reflect the relevance for the reader.
According to another scenario in the prior art, a user can search in his email system for messages containing for example the word “portal”. A prior art search function displays a list of search results which may be sorted according to a statistical and linguistic analysis of the message content in relation to the pre-given search term. The sorting of the list of search results is, however, not user based but globally calculated.
The prior art search function does not consider the importance of the sender with respect to the user as reader of the message. Moreover, it is not possible to consider messages that the user or other recipients replied as to be more relevant than messages that the user or other recipients didn't even read.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method to determine a user specific relevance score of a message within a messaging system based on meta-information of the message, thus, accounting for user specific or user defined relevance.